A Reasonable Person Would Take It #2
“So the sequencing is the whole business.” She had the napkin turned over before she’d decided to turn it over. “Everyone’s going to tell you to do the three Northeast ones first because they’re close and you can drive to them. That’s the wrong answer.”
Lasker sat back.
“Go on.”
“You do the two Chicago ones first. They’re your worst, which means they’re the only two where you’ll find out whether your thesis is true, and you want to find that out in month four with two buildings and not in month twenty with nine.
” She had stopped being polite about a sentence ago.
“And they’re in one market, so you hire one regional person instead of three, and if the thesis is wrong you’ve spent your cheapest year finding out.
The Northeast three are fine. That’s the problem with them.
Fine assets teach you nothing and they’ll still be fine in eighteen months. ”
The bakery did whatever bakeries do at a quarter to three.
“Say the last part again,” Lasker said.
“Fine assets teach you nothing.”
“That’s what I said in the board meeting in May.” Lasker had not moved. “I lost. Three to two. I’ve got eleven properties and a capital plan that starts in Hartford because two people who have never operated a building thought it looked tidier on a map.”
“Then your year one is the Northeast.”
“My year one is the Northeast,” Lasker agreed. “Unless somebody sits in an operating review in September and makes the argument you just made in ninety seconds on the back of a napkin, at which point I have a second voice and it stops being three to two.”
Jo looked down and discovered she had drawn a sequencing grid.
That was the moment. Not the money, and not the equity, and not the file Lasker had read on her.
It was that she’d had an opinion about eleven buildings she had never seen, and it had been good, and there was nowhere in her actual job to put it — and a stranger in a bakery had heard it, disagreed with nobody, and immediately started counting votes.
She wanted it. She knew she wanted it, and she kept talking.
Then, because she had been sitting in a bakery for thirty-five minutes with a woman who had told her the truth about the hours, Jo went back and picked up the thread that had been lying on the floor the whole time.
“You said you’d tell me who the money is.”
“I did say that.”
And Jo knew. One question early, the way you know the end of a sentence before it arrives.
The neglected assets inside larger portfolios.
The Castellane-side committee member who wouldn’t shut up.
The June close, the same month as a conference room on the forty-second floor.
Eleven properties in a hospitality portfolio, being run as an afterthought, by a company whose heir apparent had spent eighteen months telling anyone who’d listen that the family business had gone soft.
“It’s Castellane,” Jo said.
“It’s Castellane money. It is not Castellane.
” Lasker did not look at the folder. “That distinction is going to matter to you a great deal in the next four seconds, so let me get it right. Vivienne Castellane is the anchor investor. She holds thirty-one percent. She has one board seat of five. She does not run this company, she does not sit in my operating reviews, and if she attempted to hire or fire anyone on my team I would resign in the same meeting, which she knows, because I told her so in April and put it in the shareholders’ agreement in May. ”
Jo did not get up.
She thought about it. She was aware of thinking about it — of the chair under her, of the second where a reasonable woman with a boyfriend and a folded page in her bag stands, says I think you know why I can’t, and goes back to work.
She stayed in the chair.
“You knew,” Jo said. “When you read the file. You knew who I work for.”
“Yes.”
“And who I—” She stopped. There was no word for it that she was going to say to a stranger in a bakery.
“I know what’s in the public record and I know what people say, and I have made a point of not knowing the difference.
” Lasker looked at her steadily. “I’ll tell you what I told Jonah when he brought me your name and I saw where you worked.
I said: find out if she’s good. He said she’s the best on the list. I said then that’s the end of the conversation about where she works. ”
“That’s a very clean answer.”
“It’s a rehearsed answer, because I knew you’d ask it.” Now she did smile, briefly. “It’s also true. Both things happen.”
Jo looked past her, at the folder on the chair.
“I’m not going to say yes to a coffee.”
“God, no. Nobody should.” Lasker reached down and got the folder off the chair and put it on the table, square, not sliding it across.
“This is the deck, the term sheet, the shareholders’ agreement, and the last three months of operating reports on the two Chicago properties, which are the two worst. Not the good ones. I want you looking at the bad ones.”
“That’s unusual.”
“It’s efficient. You’d ask for them in week two anyway and I’d rather not spend a week.
” Lasker stood and put her jacket on. “I’m not going to sell you on it, Jo.
I don’t have to. A reasonable person in your position would take this job, and if you’re not that person, I’d rather we both found out in July than in October. ”
They were on the sidewalk when Vivienne came out of the car.
She had not been in the bakery. Jo was certain of that; she had faced the door the entire time. The car had been at the curb for some part of the meeting, and Vivienne had waited in it, which meant she had chosen to wait in it.
“Corinne.”
“Vivienne.” Lasker’s tone did not shift at all. That was worth more to Jo than anything either woman said. “We’re done. I gave her the Chicago numbers.”
“Of course you did.” Vivienne turned. In the ordinary July light on Fifty-Third Street she looked like herself and not at all as though she had come to say something.
“Ms. Marlowe. I’m going to say three sentences and then get back in the car, because anything I add past three will be heard as pressure, and pressure would waste a good offer. ”
Jo waited.
“The first is that this is real. There is no version of this where the job evaporates, or changes shape, or turns out to have a condition attached that nobody mentioned in a bakery.” Vivienne said it plainly, without emphasis, a figure read off a page.
“The second is that it is not contingent on anything. Not on what you do about Alexander, not on what he does about me, not on anything that happens at Warrick Street between now and Christmas. If you take it and you stay with him, that is a Tuesday. It changes nothing on my side, and I’d ask you to actually believe that rather than filing it as the thing I would obviously say. ”
“And the third?”
Vivienne looked at her for a moment.